That Smell
Street Survivors was in stores for three days before the plane went down.
Ronnie Van Zant wrote “That Smell” because he was afraid his bandmates were going to die. Not the general fear that hangs over every touring band — the road, the bottle, the next bad decision. A specific fear, with names attached. He had watched Gary Rossington wrap a car around an oak tree. He had watched the needle and the bottle go around the tour bus. He believed the band was going to lose somebody, and he wrote the song to say so out loud. Then the album shipped, and three days later he was dead at twenty-nine.
The oak tree is real. Rossington hit it in the summer of 1976, broke his arms, nearly died. Van Zant put it in the song by name: “Whiskey bottles, and brand new cars, oak tree you’re in my way.” He couldn’t stop what was happening to his friends. He could write it down and make them play it. That was the tool he had.
He doesn’t sing it angry. There’s no sermon in these verses — what’s in them is closer to grief, the sound of a man mourning someone who is still alive. The song is a confrontation, but it’s a confrontation by someone who already suspects he’s going to lose.
The record itself was made by a band playing as well as it ever played. Tom Dowd produced Street Survivors at Criteria Studios in Miami — the room where he’d made records with Clapton, with Ray Charles, with the Allman Brothers. He knew what a great band sounded like, and this was one. Allen Collins and Gary Rossington open the song with that descending riff, coiling around each other, and they keep it moving for nearly six minutes. Both solos are ferocious. The band is locked in from the first bar.
That’s part of what makes the song hard to sit with. This isn’t a band falling apart on tape. It’s a band at full power, recording a warning about itself.
And nothing in the song resolves. Nobody gets clean. Nobody turns around. It ends with the riff still circling and the question still open, because Van Zant wasn’t going to write a happy ending he didn’t believe was coming.
There’s a line in the second verse worth slowing down for: “Angel of darkness is upon you, stuck a needle in your arm.” Van Zant grew up Pentecostal in Jacksonville, Florida. His religion was tangled — tangled up with music and whiskey and a Southern understanding of sin and consequence — but the angel of darkness was not a figure of speech to him. He sang that line like a man who believed the Devil was real and was currently riding the tour bus. Coming from him, it isn’t imagery. It’s a warning.
Three days after the album came out, the chartered Convair 240 ran out of fuel over Gillsburg, Mississippi, and came down in the trees. Van Zant died on impact. Steve and Cassie Gaines died. The road manager and the assistant road manager died. Others survived and carried it for the rest of their lives.
Rossington survived. The man who hit the oak tree, the man the song was aimed at — he lived until 2023, and he played “That Smell” for forty-six years. The warning outlived the man who wrote it, and the man it warned carried it the longest.
MCA pulled Street Survivors from shelves days after the crash and reissued it with a new cover. The original showed the band surrounded by flames; the label called it bad taste. I understand the decision. But the record they were softening was the one where Van Zant had already told everyone, plainly, exactly what he was afraid of.
The song is five minutes and forty-eight seconds long. It was written by a man who saw something coming and could not stop it, and recorded by a band that played it as hard as anything they ever cut. I don’t know a heavier fact in rock and roll than the distance between that warning and the swamp in Mississippi.
He wrote the song because he was afraid his friends were going to die. He was right, and he was one of them. He got three days.
